Building a Growth Team

Assemble and structure a high-impact team to scale distribution and optimize the user journey.

Help the user with building a growth team using insights from 14 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

How to Help

1. Assess Readiness - Evaluate if your product-market fit and data infrastructure are mature enough to support a dedicated growth function.
2. Identify Bottlenecks - Map your current user journey friction to specific growth profiles like acquisition marketers or growth PMs.
3. Design Org Structure - Determine whether a centralized, decentralized, or hybrid model best suits your company culture and execution speed.
4. Screen for Competencies - Use a first-principles competency model to evaluate candidates based on specific skills rather than past company names.

Core Principles

Avoid Pattern Matching

Adam Fishman: "I get asked all the time about how do you hire growth people? And it's usually something like, 'Hey, how do we find you but 10 years earlier in your career?' And it feels like that question is missing the first principles approach to hiring a growth person. And if you're doing that, you're just pattern matching to me."

Do not hire based on a candidate's previous company pedigree. Instead, use a first-principles competency model to identify the specific skills required to solve your unique growth challenges.

Founders Lead First

Elena Verna 3.0: "In order to get the growth going in the company, a founder and the founding team have to figure out how to make it grow to the first, let's say a million, 5 million, 10 million in ARR. Some of the companies don't even create growth teams until they're a hundred, 200 million in ARR because to figure out your product market fit and how to distribute it's not something that you can outsource to somebody."

Founders must personally drive the initial growth phase to establish product-market fit. Delegation to a dedicated team should only occur once you reach significant revenue and high user volume.

Leverage Specialized Advisors

Luc Levesque: "We talk about the 10X engineer and we don't really talk about the 10X growth advisor or 10X growth person, but the same dynamic applies. You could argue it applies even more because the right growth advisor can have literally company changing impact."

External growth advisors can provide immense leverage by identifying high-impact insights that internal teams might overlook. Bring them in early to find the needle in the haystack changes.

Organize by Channels

Sri Batchu: "Historically the way we've been organized is we've got channel based teams that are deploying spend in a given channel. So we've got a paid marketing team, a lifecycle CRM team, we've got a field marketing team, et cetera. And then we've got a product engineering team that is supporting growth and sales and helping each of these channels be more effective that's dedicated to growth. And then separate from that, we've got a small kind of what I call an innovation or skunk work type of team that works on cross-channel."

Structure your growth organization around specific distribution channels like paid marketing or lifecycle CRM. Support these efforts with dedicated growth engineering and innovation expertise.

Evolve Through Phases

From "Five steps to starting your product-led growth motion, part 2": "If you are serious about your PLG motion, you will need to have a dedicated team working on it. But, importantly, there is no “standard” PLG team setup that works for all companies. And even within a company, the ideal structure will change over time too."

Growth team structures are not static. They must evolve through beginning, growing, and scaling phases, often starting as a cross-functional tiger team before becoming a formal department.

Sequence Hires Logically

From "Six rules of hiring for growth": "In almost all cases, you want to start by hiring a Builder, to prove your model’s validity. If most of your assumptions were right and you are enjoying early traction, you should move to Optimizers next to capture most of the value, finishing with Innovators to begin iterating on the model."

Start with generalist builders who can validate your growth model. Only move to functional specialists and optimizers once the initial hypotheses are proven.

Verify Product-Market Fit

From "How to hire your first growth team": "Growth is about increasing the distribution of the core product. If there is no validation that the product has found PMF, growth has nothing to grow. PMF has to happen first, then growth."

Hiring a growth team before achieving product-market fit is a waste of capital. A growth function requires a validated product and a clear funnel to be effective.

Empower with Resources

From "Summary: The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab)": "If you're serious about PLG, then a dedicated team is necessary. Assigning just one person to manage all the different stakeholders and parts of PLG won't cut it."

A successful growth team must be cross-functional and dedicated. Individual owners without the resources to influence both product and go-to-market strategies will struggle to move metrics.

Templates & Frameworks

• Growth Bottleneck-to-Hire Mapping (How to hire your first growth team) - A mapping table that helps you identify the right first growth hire based on your biggest growth bottleneck
• PLG Team Evolution Model (Three Phases) (Five steps to starting your product-led growth motion, part 2) - A phased approach to building and scaling a PLG team from inception to mature organization
• Centralized vs. Decentralized Growth Team Archetypes (How to hire your first growth team) - Two structural archetypes for growth teams with distinct superpowers, drawbacks, and use cases
• Three Growth Hire Profiles: Innovators, Builders, Optimizers (Six rules of hiring for growth) - A classification of growth professionals into three archetypes to guide hiring sequence and role definition.
• 5-Step Playbook for Introducing a Growth Team to a Traditional Org (This Week #5: Overcoming impostor syndrome, introducing growth to an org, and how to partner with your data scientist) - A step-by-step approach for shifting a company from siloed sales/marketing-driven growth to a cross-functional growth team model.
• Minimum Growth Experiment Team Composition (This Week #5: Overcoming impostor syndrome, introducing growth to an org, and how to partner with your data scientist) - The minimum team composition Lenny recommends for a 6-month growth experiment to prove the value of a growth team.
• Growth Competency Model (Adam Fishman) - A four-quadrant model to evaluate growth practitioners and build balanced growth teams.
• Growth Org Placement Decision Process (Six rules of hiring for growth) - A two-step process for deciding where your growth team should sit organizationally.
• Builder vs. Leader First Hire Framework (How to hire your first growth team) - Why your first growth hire should be a builder, not a leader

See references/artifacts.md for the full list with details.

Questions to Help Users

• "Have you reached at least $1M in ARR and achieved consistent product-market fit?"
• "Is your data infrastructure reliable enough to track granular user behavior and conversion events?"
• "Where is the primary bottleneck in your current funnel: awareness, activation, or retention?"
• "Should the growth team report to Product, Marketing, or the CEO based on your current priorities?"
• "Do you need a 'Builder' to create new systems or an 'Optimizer' to refine existing ones?"

Common Mistakes to Flag

• Hiring pre-PMF - Growth functions scale what is already working, and applying them to a broken product wastes resources.
• Missing the data foundation - Without a dedicated data team and clean infrastructure, a growth team cannot measure impact or run valid experiments.
• Lack of cross-functional resources - Growth requires influence over both product code and marketing spend; siloed individuals often lack the necessary access.
• Chasing vanity metrics - Focusing on short-term wins can lead to data manipulation and long-term business value erosion.

Deep Dive

For all 14 sourced insights from 14 guests, see references/guest-insights.md

Related Skills

• Hiring Product Talent
• Interviewing Evaluating Candidates
• Org Design
• Founding Exec Team

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Supporting file: references/artifacts.md

Building a Growth Team - Frameworks, Templates & Checklists

36 artifacts extracted from Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter

Frameworks

B2B Growth Squad Composition (Five steps to starting your product-led growth motion, part 2)

The essential and extended roles that make up a PLG growth squad

How it works: Core Growth Squad (essential roles):

• Product Manager (Growth PM)
• Analyst
• Engineer(s)
• Designer

Extended B2B Growth Squad (additional roles for B2B):

• Marketing team member (embedded in specific squads)
• Sales/Customer Success team member (embedded in specific squads)

These extended roles make B2B growth teams more effective by ensuring cross-functional collaboration is built into the squad structure rather than requiring external coordination.

B2B Growth Team Phases (Shaun Clowes)

The three phases a B2B growth team goes through: gold rush (proving value), systematizing (making it repeatable), and operationalizing (fitting into the org).

How it works: Phase 1 - Gold Rush: Prove growth is even worth doing. Low-hanging fruit is abundant. Random search across opportunities. Phase 2 - Systematize: Make it repeatable across paid acquisition, activation, retention, engagement, cross-product expansion, upsells. Phase 3 - Operationalize: Fit into the broader org. Growth sits between everyone else's sandpit—at the edge of product, sales, and marketing. Common failure modes: Can't find wins, wins seem random, can't fit organizationally.

Builder vs. Leader First Hire Framework (How to hire your first growth team)

Why your first growth hire should be a builder, not a leader

How it works: Problem: Even the most experienced growth leaders take 6-12 months to fully understand the local business ecosystem (products, industries, markets, customers, internal dynamics). When forced to deliver immediate results, they copy-paste from previous experiences, leading to initiatives that don't produce desired outcomes.

Solution: Hire a 'builder' profile first — a growth generalist focused on broad tactical and execution skills within a specific domain. Examples: Acquisition PM, Activation PM, Monetization PM, Acquisition Growth Marketer, Retention Growth Marketer.

Principle: Sustainable growth is about evolution, not revolution. Builders are ideal when standing up growth processes and systems from the ground up.

Centralized vs. Decentralized Growth Team Archetypes (How to hire your first growth team)

Two structural archetypes for growth teams with distinct superpowers, drawbacks, and use cases

How it works: Archetype 1 — Centralized Growth Team:

• Structure: Growth marketing, product, and analytics report to Head of Growth. Dedicated engineering and design embedded or directly reporting to Head of Growth. Head of Growth reports to CEO or Marketing/Product/Revenue leader.
• Companies: Dropbox, HubSpot, GitLab, Miro, SurveyMonkey, Snyk
• Superpower: Velocity — aligned priorities, self-sufficient, customized processes/rituals, can re-prioritize on the fly
• Drawbacks: (1) Centralization of responsibility / hoarding growth accountability, (2) Resource constraints as rest of org doesn't contribute, (3) Unclear career progression
• Best for: Increasing learning velocity, beginning experimentation practice, pressure-testing business assumptions

Archetype 2 — Decentralized Growth Team (Tribe):

• Structure: Each growth marketer or PM reports to their respective function (growth product into Product, growth marketing into Marketing), coming together as a 'growth tribe'
• Companies: Amplitude, Airtable, Pinterest, Twilio, SurveyMonkey
• Superpower: Cultivates growth culture across org, fosters shared ownership and accountability, leads to sustainable/scalable growth
• Drawbacks: (1) Conflicting department priorities slow velocity, (2) Coordination complexity increases with scale, (3) Communication breakdown across departments
• Best for: Connecting initiatives to outcomes, creating a data-driven growth mindset

Decision criteria: Start with decentralized if unsure. Move to centralized when velocity/decision-making is an issue. Expect to oscillate between models as circumstances change.

Foundational Growth Tools Triad (This Week #9: Breaking into growth, leading with influence, and (not) stepping on toes 🦶)

The three foundational tools that great growth teams want to see candidates demonstrate

How it works: Three foundational tools for growth:

1. Data Analysis — both qualitative and quantitative
2. User Psychology — understanding user motivations and behavior
3. Experiment-driven methodology — structured approach to running and learning from experiments

The key is showing how you would approach solving problems using all three, rather than pitching specific tactical ideas.

Growth Bottleneck-to-Hire Mapping (How to hire your first growth team)

A mapping table that helps you identify the right first growth hire based on your biggest growth bottleneck

How it works: The newsletter includes an image/table mapping growth bottlenecks to specific hire types. The framework identifies four bottleneck areas: (1) Acquisition — hire: Acquisition PM, Acquisition Growth Marketer; (2) Activation — hire: Activation PM; (3) Engagement — hire: Retention Growth Marketer, Engagement PM; (4) Monetization — hire: Monetization PM. Key principle: Don't hire growth team members just to 'accelerate growth.' Know where you are experiencing friction to ensure sufficient data tracking and understanding of your growth model to bring the right talent on board.

Growth Competency Model (Adam Fishman)

A four-quadrant model to evaluate growth practitioners and build balanced growth teams.

How it works: Divided into four buckets: 1. Growth Execution (channel fluency, experimentation, productizing learnings). 2. Customer Knowledge (data fluency, user psychology, narrative/creative). 3. Growth Strategy (loop modeling, capital allocation, prioritization). 4. Communication & Influence (strategic communication, team leadership, stakeholder management).

Growth Head Reporting Structure Decision (Five steps to starting your product-led growth motion, part 2)

Two models for where the head of growth should sit in the org, with trade-offs for each

How it works: Model A: Head of Growth → CPO (Product Leader)

• Most common setup
• Growth team operates similarly to other product teams
• Needs close collaboration with sales and marketing
• KPIs aligned with broader GTM organization
• Used by most PLG-native companies (e.g., Airtable, Snyk)

Model B: Head of Growth → CRO / Head of GTM

• Head of growth acts as a GM for the self-service product line
• Owns self-service ARR as a KPI (rolls up to overall ARR)
• Needs to drive both marketing and growth product teams to control the entire PLG self-service funnel
• Benefit: Minimizes conflict between growth team and sales org (not taking away revenue/quotas/commissions)
• CRO is incentivized to drive highest ARR at lowest cost
• More common among B2B companies with established sales/GTM orgs
• Examples: GitHub, Cloudflare

Growth Team Definition (What Growth Teams Do vs. Don't Do) (How to hire your first growth team)

Clear definition of the growth team's scope vs. product/marketing teams

How it works: Growth teams DON'T build net new products or features. Growth teams DO create distribution strategies that help acquire, activate, engage, and monetize customers on existing product value. As Casey Winters puts it: 'Most product and marketing teams are built to create or expand the core value provided to customers. Growth is connecting more people to the existing value.' Growth teams/pods are typically formed around: (1) Acquisition, (2) Activation, (3) Monetization, (4) Engagement goals.

Growth Team Purpose Framework (5 Problems Growth Teams Solve) (How to hire your first growth team)

Five specific problems that growth teams exist to solve, mapped to which team structure best addresses them

How it works: Growth teams solve: (1) Increase learning velocity — best solved by centralized/dedicated team; (2) Begin experimentation practice — best solved by centralized/dedicated team; (3) Pressure-test existing business assumptions — best solved by centralized/dedicated team; (4) Connect initiatives to outcomes — best solved by decentralized growth tribe; (5) Create a data-driven growth mindset — best solved by decentralized growth tribe.

Growth Team Staging Framework (Pre-PMF → Finding PMF → Scaling PMF) (How to hire your first growth team)

A three-stage framework for when and how to approach growth hiring based on company maturity

How it works: Stage 1 — Before PMF: Develop a growth model hypothesis. Don't hire growth talent. Focus on hypothesizing distribution strategy (product-led, marketing-led, sales-led). Design the product with distribution goals in mind.

Stage 2 — Finding PMF: Founder-led growth. Founder drives growth across chosen motions: (a) Product-led: founder builds product experiences for distribution goals from acquisition to monetization; (b) Marketing-led: founder prototypes third-party channels and content; (c) Sales-led: founder does sales themselves. If you must hire, look for: (1) high iteration/learning velocity, (2) growth mindset, (3) strong execution skills as a generalist, (4) ideally someone internal with business context.

Stage 3 — Scaling PMF: Hire first full-time growth roles. Right time = ready to scale distribution of validated PMF + initial validation of distribution methods. Anchor first hire's skill set to biggest growth lever experiencing friction.

PLG Organizational Design (Hila Qu)

A structure for aligning cross-functional leaders around a product-led motion.

How it works: 1. Head of Growth Product (reports to Product, owns usage/activation/PQLs). 2. Head of Growth Marketing (reports to Marketing, owns high-quality signups). 3. Head of Product-Led Sales (reports to Sales, owns converting PQLs to revenue).

PLG Team Evolution Model (Summary: The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab))

How to structure and evolve a growth team from initial formation to a full PLG organization

How it works: PHASE 1 - Initial Team Formation (choose one): Option A - Dedicated Team: Head of growth + dedicated resources. Best for clear focus areas. Option B - Tiger Team: Cross-functional group assembled for a specific purpose/time period. Best when initial focus involves multiple departments (e.g., PQLs involving sales, marketing, data).

PHASE 2 - Core Growth Squad (MVP team):

• Growth PM (most critical role; like traditional PM but more focused on analytics, experimentation, data-driven decisions)
• Data Analyst (one of the very first hires)
• Engineers
• Designer (may not need full-time dedication initially)

Hiring preference: Internal first (better understanding of systems, culture, products). Could be a PM wanting to focus on growth, an analyst wanting product orientation, or someone from another department with strong analytical skills. External hire: find someone with experience in your initial growth focus area.

PHASE 3 - PLG Organization:

• Head of Growth Product (owns usage and activation metrics)
• Head of Growth Marketing
• Head of Product-Led Sales (owns conversion rates and revenue) Each manages different parts of the PLG motion with clearly owned metrics.

PLG Team Evolution Model (Three Phases) (Five steps to starting your product-led growth motion, part 2)

A phased approach to building and scaling a PLG team from inception to mature organization

How it works: Phase 1: Beginning Phase — Goal: Prove PLG is a good fit for the business

• Option A: Dedicated growth team — hire/reassign a growth PM, add analyst, designer, engineers. Assign a KPI. Focus on in-product experiments (signup/trial, activation, onboarding, self-service purchase, pricing pages) + data/experimentation foundations.
• Option B: Cross-functional tiger team — pull from product, marketing, sales, and data with design/engineering support. Best for larger initiatives like launching freemium, opening free trial, setting up PQL from scratch. Example: MongoDB's PLG exploration → evolved into CloudAtlas.

Phase 2: Growing Phase — PLG proven successful, time to formalize

• Dedicated product growth team + dedicated PLG counterparts in sales and marketing orgs
• Reporting structure options: a. Head of Growth → CPO (most common, growth team operates like product team, but needs close collaboration with sales/marketing) b. Head of Growth → CRO/Head of GTM (growth head acts as GM for self-service product line, owns self-service ARR, minimizes sales conflict). Examples: GitHub, Cloudflare.
• Note: 'Head of Product-Led Sales' is the least developed role. Often filled by head of SMB/self-service/online sales.

Phase 3: Scaling Phase — Growth team becomes larger and more established

• Subteams by funnel stage: Acquisition, Activation, Conversion, Retention, plus Platform/Telemetry infrastructure
• Each subteam composition: PM + analyst + engineer + designer (core growth squad)
• B2B addition: Embed marketing and sales/CS members into specific squads
• Subteams should be centered around biggest levers and gaps in growth model

Three Growth Hire Profiles: Innovators, Builders, Optimizers (Six rules of hiring for growth)

A classification of growth professionals into three archetypes to guide hiring sequence and role definition.

How it works: 1. Innovators: Enjoy thinking BIG. Love ideating about new loops, channels, tactics. Pressure-test existing hypotheses. Typical titles: VP-level Growth roles. Best deployed to: Evolve your growth model.

1. Builders: Generalists who build out existing growth model hypotheses by creating systems, processes, and learnings. Typical titles: Growth PM, Growth Marketing, Lifecycle Manager. Best deployed to: Prove your model's validity.

2. Optimizers: Hold deep functional knowledge. Capture every last improvement from any given channel, tactic, or loop. Typical titles: SEO Specialist, Adwords Specialist, CRO. Best deployed to: Maximize value from proven channels.

Hiring Sequence Decision Tree:

• Start: Always hire a Builder first
• If growth model hypothesis is CORRECT (early traction): Builder → Optimizers → Innovators
• If growth model hypothesis is WRONG (not seeing impact): Builder → Innovators → Optimizers

Why Acquisition Should Be Your First Growth Team Focus (How to hire your first growth team)

Four reasons why 90% of new growth teams should start with acquisition

How it works: 90% of the time, acquisition is the first goal new growth teams take on. Four reasons: (1) More user volume in earlier stages of customer journey for data-driven, scientific approach; (2) Most businesses experience biggest drop-offs around acquisition, enabling faster time-to-value for new growth team; (3) Improved acquisition leads to healthier engagement and monetization downstream; (4) Monetization is complex involving all company stakeholders — growth team must build organizational trust before addressing it.

Checklists

5-Step Playbook for Introducing a Growth Team to a Traditional Org (This Week #5: Overcoming impostor syndrome, introducing growth to an org, and how to partner with your data scientist)

A step-by-step approach for shifting a company from siloed sales/marketing-driven growth to a cross-functional growth team model.

How it works: 1. BRING IN EXPERTS: Invite growth leaders from companies your leaders admire to meet with your company's leaders. Have them do a fireside chat. Ask pointed questions about how they operate and how marketing/sales fit in. An outside voice is often very impactful (this worked at Airbnb).

1. BENCHMARK AGAINST OTHER COMPANIES: Lighter-weight version of #1. Talk to external growth folks yourself and collect lessons. Build findings into a pitch deck for your execs.

2. GET BUY-IN FROM THE TOP: You need CEO or senior leader support. They need to make it clear this is important and requires existing marketing/sales leader support. Without this, expect friction, politics, and tension because people will feel their jobs are threatened. Help them see where they'd fit in the new structure.

3. RUN AN EXPERIMENT: If you can't get buy-in on a big change, ask for a 6-month experiment. Pull together: a data scientist, an engineer, a PM, and ideally a designer and researcher. Show measurable growth impact, then pitch what 5x more resources could do. Important: actually get 6 months—otherwise you'll run out of time before you can instrument, design, build, launch, and measure.

4. BECOME A THOUGHT LEADER WITHIN THE ORG: Send a weekly 'This Week in Growth' email highlighting lessons from your company and others. Invite weekly/monthly speakers. Start a Slack room for growth topics. Share podcasts, articles, and books about growth. Become the go-to person everyone thinks of for growth questions.

Early Growth Hire Evaluation Criteria (How to hire your first growth team)

Four criteria for evaluating a growth hire during the finding-PMF stage

How it works: If you must hire dedicated growth talent during finding-PMF stage, look for someone with: (1) High iteration/learning velocity; (2) A growth mindset; (3) Strong execution skills — a generalist who can execute across different growth problems; (4) Ideally someone internal who already has the business context.

Five Qualities of Great Growth Leaders (Six rules of hiring for growth)

A screening rubric for evaluating internal or external candidates for growth roles.

How it works: Unifying qualities across all successful growth leaders:

1. Connect actions to outcomes — ability to link tactical work to business results
2. Be data-driven — comfort with quantitative analysis and experimentation
3. Have a growth mindset — openness to learning, iteration, and ambiguity
4. Respect for scientific method — hypothesis-driven experimentation approach
5. Hunger for learning — continuous self-improvement and curiosity

Common prior backgrounds of successful growth leaders:

• Data analytics (Casey Winters, Elena Verna, Crystal Widjaja)
• Engineering (Lenny Rachitsky, Matt Greenberg)
• Marketing manager (Adam Fishman, Adam Grenier)
• Product manager (Bangaly Kaba, Naomi Ionita, Nick Soman)

Growth Org Placement Decision Process (Six rules of hiring for growth)

A two-step process for deciding where your growth team should sit organizationally.

How it works: Step 1: Prioritize the growth lever needing the most improvement:

• Acquisition: e.g., 'My new user growth is 50%, but I believe I should be at hypergrowth of 75% due to current market demand'
• Retention: e.g., 'Less than 10% of my customers reach the aha moment, need 30%'
• Monetization: e.g., 'My free-to-paid conversion is 2%, industry average is 5%' Most companies start with acquisition or retention (specifically onboarding), then monetization.

Step 2: Match growth motion to org placement:

• Marketing-led motion (e.g., capture SEO, paid marketing) → Hire a growth marketer under Marketing
• Product-led motion (e.g., user referral loops, collaborative features) → Hire a growth PM under Product
• Sales-led motion (e.g., BDRs, outbound efforts) → Hire under Sales

Key warning: Don't hire a growth marketer to solve a product-led motion.

Embedded vs. Stand-alone teams: Embedded Pros: Cleaner org design; feels like evolution; easier propagation of learnings; growth mindset throughout org Embedded Con: Hard time maintaining growth focus; often works on core product/marketing projects (silent killer) Stand-alone Pro: Full autonomy in decision-making Stand-alone Cons: Feels like revolution; absorbs too much accountability so rest of org disengages from growth goals

Recommendation: Always start embedded, frequently re-evaluate.

Minimum Growth Experiment Team Composition (This Week #5: Overcoming impostor syndrome, introducing growth to an org, and how to partner with your data scientist)

The minimum team composition Lenny recommends for a 6-month growth experiment to prove the value of a growth team.

How it works: Must-have roles:

• 1 Data Scientist
• 1 Engineer
• 1 Product Manager

Ideal additions:

• 1 Designer
• 1 Researcher

Key parameters:

• Duration: 6 months minimum (otherwise risk running out of time before showing results)
• Activities to account for: learning to operate as a team, instrumenting the product, designing experiments, building, launching, and waiting for results
• Success metric: show measurable growth impact, then pitch what 5x more resources could do

Six Common Growth Hiring Mistakes (Six rules of hiring for growth)

A checklist of the most common mistakes founders make when embarking on growth hiring, to be used as a pre-flight check.

How it works: Avoid these mistakes:

1. Hiring a growth generalist without understanding what growth means for your company
2. Building a growth team before a data team
3. Prioritizing Head of Growth as your first growth hire
4. Hiring the wrong type of growth profile
5. Chasing after external talent
6. Putting growth in the wrong department

Six Rules of Hiring for Growth (The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter—2024 Edition, The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter 2023)

Rules to follow when hiring for growth roles

How it works: Six specific rules for hiring growth roles. Covers when, who, and how to hire for growth-focused positions. Located in the hiring/interviewing section of the best-of collection.

Three Principles for Building a Growth Team from Scratch (This Week #2: Tackling the chicken-and-egg problem, building a growth team from scratch, and addressing overlap with PM peers 🤔)

Lenny's supplemental guidance on standing up a growth team, layered on top of recommended reading

How it works: 1. Everyone in the company should feel responsible for growth — from CX to IT to product. Though a dedicated growth team is extremely valuable, don't delegate growth to just that one group. 2. Early on, focus on 2x-10x growth levers — Unless your product is designed to grow through viral loops, a % increase in conversion in the early days won't have the best ROI. Look for step-change opportunities. 3. Once retention is healthy, focus on top of funnel — Your biggest growth wins will come from the top of the funnel. Put a significant portion of budget and resources into referrals, performance marketing, SEO, and landing page optimization.

Three Rules for Building Your First Growth Team (How to hire your first growth team)

Summary advice on structuring and hiring a growth team

How it works: 1. Don't hire too early, pre-scaling PMF. 2. Hire the right type of talent to address your specific growth bottlenecks and challenges. 3. There are trade-offs between decentralized vs. centralized team structures, and they address different organizational problems.

Examples

Amplitude Growth Team Evolution (Decentralized to Centralized and Back) (How to hire your first growth team)

How Amplitude oscillated between centralized and decentralized growth team structures

How it works: Amplitude started with a dedicated growth team focused first on growth traffic, then took ownership of activation, monetization awareness, and self-serve product feature engagement. Growth product and engineering reported into Head of Growth for speed and ownership. They later evolved into a decentralized structure with each function reporting into the functional head, to spread growth mindset. They went from decentralized to centralized (Marketing and Product report into VP of Growth), then back to decentralized (Growth Marketing reports into CMO; Growth Product and Analytics report into VP of Growth).

Andrew Chen's Definition of a Growth Team (This Week #5: Overcoming impostor syndrome, introducing growth to an org, and how to partner with your data scientist)

The canonical definition of a growth team (formerly 'growth hacker') from Andrew Chen, quoted by Lenny to establish what a modern growth function looks like.

How it works: A growth team is 'a hybrid of marketer and coders who looks at the traditional question of "How do I get customers for my product?" and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, etc. On top of this, they layer the discipline of direct marketing, with its emphasis on quantitative measurement, scenario modeling via spreadsheets, and a lot of database queries. If a startup is pre-product-market fit, a growth team can make sure virality is embedded at the core of a product. After product-market fit, they can help run up the score on what's already working.'

GitLab Growth Team Evolution (How to hire your first growth team)

How GitLab structured and evolved its growth team from four sub-teams to two consolidated teams

How it works: GitLab initially had four growth sub-teams: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, and Expansion. Engineering resources were stretched too thin, so they consolidated into two teams: Activation and Conversion. This led to increased velocity and impact without abandoning Expansion and Retention. They also established a dedicated product analytics team within growth, significantly improving productivity. Adding a 'Head of Online Sales' role in the sales organization helped align growth and sales efforts. Key insight for B2B PLG: design a sales counterpart early in the process.

Noom's Growth Team Structure and Milestones (How to win in consumer subscription)

How Noom's growth team was structured and when they scaled hiring relative to revenue

How it works: 2016-2018: Growth team had no more than 10 people (across creative, marketing, growth product, etc.). Late 2016: Started gaining traction, ending the year at $3-4M in revenue. Growth target: One-month payback period, allowing immediate reinvestment into performance marketing engine. Team structure: PM was top contributor to growth repo, one growth marketer responsible for all spend. 2019: Started hiring significantly after raising with Sequoia, once well past $60M in revenue/year.

Key insight: Staying small forced development of hacking skills and defined growth culture.

Pinterest Growth Team Reporting Structure Lesson (How to hire your first growth team)

How Pinterest learned that a PLG growth team should not report into Marketing

How it works: Pinterest started with growth product and engineering reporting into head of product and head of engineering (decentralized). A couple years later, they moved the growth team into Marketing. This was undone within six months because having a PLG team report into Marketing created alignment issues — growth product strategy aligned with what the product was like today, not where it would be in six months. It created a communication and alignment gap.

SurveyMonkey Growth Team Evolution (Centralized to Decentralized) (How to hire your first growth team)

How SurveyMonkey evolved from a centralized growth team to a decentralized growth tribe

How it works: Elena initially ran a dedicated (centralized) growth team at SurveyMonkey across growth product (acquisition, activation, monetization), marketing (acquisition, engagement), and analytics teams. They operated as a lean, high-velocity machine but lacked shared goals and support from the rest of the org. The team found itself solely responsible for the forecast despite being less than 25% of the company. The growth team was later split into a cross-functional growth tribe to instill a growth mindset across the entire organization and create shared accountability across growth outcomes.

Uber Growth Team Structure (How to hire your first growth team)

How Uber structured their centralized growth team reporting directly to the CEO

How it works: At Uber, the growth team was product-led and reported directly to CEO Travis Kalanick. The team included paid media, lifecycle, and SEO, which they ran more like product sprints using an 'experiment-to-build' approach instead of 'experiment-to-optimize' for the first couple of years. This allowed them to take big swings aimed at any leverage point in the business — for instance, a few sprints were focused on recruiting engineers because that was the biggest barrier to company growth.

Webflow Growth Team Centralization (How to hire your first growth team)

Webflow's recent move to centralize all growth teams under one unified growth team

How it works: At Webflow, they recently centralized all growth teams (Product Growth, Growth and Lifecycle Marketing) under one unified growth team. This has been empowering for the team and enabled better alignment and accountability. They moved from teams locally optimizing their areas to being able to consider and execute larger initiatives that previously required much more cross-team alignment.

Tools

Additional Growth Hiring Resources (Six rules of hiring for growth)

Curated list of external resources for deepening understanding of growth hiring and data scaling.

How it works: 1. 20VC podcast episode on biggest mistakes in hiring for growth — https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/elena-verna/ 2. Crystal Widjaja blog post on the journey to scale data — https://www.reforge.com/blog/scaling-data 3. Andrew Chen's blog post on hiring a Head of Growth — https://andrewchen.com/hiring-head-of-growth/ 4. Reforge's Growth Series course — https://www.reforge.com/growth-series 5. a16z guide to finding your North Star metric — https://future.a16z.com/north-star-metrics/

Growth Team Building Resource List (How to hire your first growth team)

Curated list of further reading resources on growth team hiring and structure

How it works: 1. Elena Verna: 'Six rules of hiring for growth' (Lenny's Newsletter) 2. Reforge: Growth Leadership course 3. Reforge: 'How to pick your ideal growth team structure' 4. Adam Fishman: 'Hiring your first Growth employee—part 1' (Fishman AF Newsletter) 5. Andrew Chen: 'Hiring a Head of Growth'

Recommended Reading: Building a Growth Team (This Week #2: Tackling the chicken-and-egg problem, building a growth team from scratch, and addressing overlap with PM peers 🤔)

Three curated essays Lenny recommends as essential reading for anyone building a growth team from zero

How it works: 1. 'Building a Growth Team from Zero to Fifty' by Brian Balfour — https://brianbalfour.com/essays/building-a-growth-team-from-zero-to-fifty 2. 'How to build a growth team – lessons from Uber, Hubspot, and others' by Andrew Chen — https://andrewchen.co/how-to-build-a-growth-team/ 3. 'How Do You Choose the Best Growth Team Model?' (Medium/Startup Grind) — https://medium.com/swlh/how-do-you-choose-the-best-growth-team-model-632ad5a85be9

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Supporting file: references/guest-insights.md

Building a Growth Team - All Guest Insights

14 sources, 26 insights

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Adam Fishman

"I get asked all the time about how do you hire growth people? And it's usually something like, 'Hey, how do we find you but 10 years earlier in your career?' And it feels like that question is missing the first principles approach to hiring a growth person. And if you're doing that, you're just pattern matching to me."

Insight: Avoid hiring through pattern matching and instead use a first-principles competency model to select growth leaders who solve your team's specific strategic gaps.

Tactical advice:

• Use a first-principles competency model to identify specific skills needed rather than pattern matching to past hires.
• Define a strong set of criteria for the role to prevent mismatches between founder expectations and growth reality.
• Focus on hiring practitioners who can build repeatable systems and new growth loops.

Source: How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wP8YyWH524A) @ 00:10:59

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Archie Abrams

Insight:

Source: Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vlph3dn4jnU) @ 00:29:59

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Ben Williams

Insight: A successful growth team requires a strong strategic framework to navigate and prioritize an overwhelming abundance of ideas.

Tactical advice:

• Hire leadership specifically to build out the growth organization and define its strategic remit.
• Ensure the growth team is laser-focused on reducing friction and improving developer experience.

Source: How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21sFTZzIfUk) @ 00:35:41

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Elena Verna 3.0

"In order to get the growth going in the company, a founder and the founding team have to figure out how to make it grow to the first, let's say a million, 5 million, 10 million in ARR. Some of the companies don't even create growth teams until they're a hundred, 200 million in ARR because to figure out your product market fit and how to distribute it's not something that you can outsource to somebody."

Insight: Founders must lead the initial growth phase themselves to establish product-market fit before delegating the function to a dedicated growth team.

Tactical advice:

• Delay hiring a growth team until the company reaches at least $1M to $10M in ARR.
• Ensure you have high user volume and reliable data infrastructure before bringing in growth specialists.
• Maintain founder-led growth to train the entire company to be responsible for growth levers.

Source: Elena Verna on how B2B growth is changing, product-led growth, product-led sales, why you should go freemium not trial, what features to make free, and much more @ 00:08:34

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Hila Qu

Insight: Transitioning to a product-led model often requires external expertise because the skill set for designing self-serve journeys is distinct from traditional sales-led operations.

Tactical advice:

• Assess whether your current team has the specific expertise required to design high-volume, self-service user journeys.
• Hire an advisor or growth specialist who has navigated the transition from sales-led to product-led growth before.
• Align your product, marketing, and sales teams around a shared data-driven understanding of the user journey.

Source: The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7l1fIxk7SnA) @ 01:15:21

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Laura Schaffer

Insight: Prevent growth teams from chasing short-term vanity metrics by aligning goals with longer-term outcomes and sustainable business value.

Tactical advice:

• Set growth targets over longer time horizons to discourage data manipulation.
• Define success metrics that resist being 'massaged' for short-term wins.
• Regularly review growth experiments against core business retention and value metrics.

Source: Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMAmj1bciww) @ 00:50:02

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Lauryn Isford

Insight:

Source: Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLku0AiGPVA) @ 00:51:55

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Lenny Rachitsky

"If you are serious about your PLG motion, you will need to have a dedicated team working on it. But, importantly, there is no “standard” PLG team setup that works for all companies. And even within a company, the ideal structure will change over time too."

Insight: PLG team structures should evolve through three distinct phases—beginning, growing, and scaling—rather than following a single static model.

Tactical advice:

• Start with a small, dedicated growth squad or a cross-functional tiger team to prove the motion.
• Transition to a formal organization with dedicated counterparts in sales and marketing as the motion matures.
• Center subteams around the biggest levers in your growth model, such as acquisition, activation, or retention.

Source: Five steps to starting your product-led growth motion, part 2 (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/five-steps-to-starting-your-product-led-growth-motion-part-2)

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"Growth teams don’t build net new products or features. Instead, they work on creating distribution strategies that help acquire, activate, engage, and monetize customers on the existing product value."

Insight: Growth is the process of connecting more users to existing product value through optimized distribution strategies rather than expanding the product's core features.

Tactical advice:

• Prioritize acquisition as the first goal for a new growth team to leverage higher user volume and faster time-to-value.
• Hire a 'builder' profile like an Acquisition or Activation PM as your first hire instead of a senior growth leader.
• Ensure growth responsibility is eventually shared across the entire organization to avoid the 'absolution effect.'

Source: How to hire your first growth team (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-hire-your-first-growth-team)

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"Centralized growth teams are optimized for velocity. They operate as a lean, mean, execution-hungry machine."

Insight: The choice between centralized and decentralized structures depends on whether your priority is execution speed or embedding growth culture across all product teams.

Tactical advice:

• Use a centralized reporting structure to allow for aligned priorities and customized development lifecycles.
• Designate a sales counterpart early in the process for B2B PLG teams to align growth and sales efforts.
• Watch for resourcing constraints in centralized models where the rest of the organization may stop contributing to growth success.

Source: How to hire your first growth team (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-hire-your-first-growth-team)

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"If you're serious about PLG, then a dedicated team is necessary. Assigning just one person to manage all the different stakeholders and parts of PLG won't cut it."

Insight: Successful PLG requires a dedicated, cross-functional team rather than individual owners who lack the resources to influence both product and go-to-market functions.

Tactical advice:

• Establish a dedicated growth team with ownership over key metrics like activation and conversion.
• Hire individuals who can manage complex stakeholders across marketing, sales, and product.
• Empower the team to build foundational components like self-service checkout and onboarding flows.

Source: Summary: The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab) (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/summary-the-ultimate-guide-to-adding-a-plg-motion--hila-qu-reforge-gitlab)

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"Growth is about increasing the distribution of the core product. If there is no validation that the product has found PMF, growth has nothing to grow. PMF has to happen first, then growth."

Insight: Hiring a growth team before achieving product-market fit wastes capital because growth functions require a validated product to scale effectively.

Tactical advice:

• Wait until you are ready to scale distribution of a validated product before making your first full-time growth hire.
• Identify exactly where your funnel is experiencing friction before hiring to ensure the new hire can have an immediate impact.
• Avoid hiring for growth simply to 'accelerate growth' without data tracking and a clear understanding of your growth model.

Source: How to hire your first growth team (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-hire-your-first-growth-team)

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"Your first growth hire’s skill set should be anchored to the biggest growth lever that is currently experiencing friction: acquisition, activation, engagement, or monetization. Is your biggest bottleneck to growth today acquiring new users, activating those users, keeping them retained, or generating revenue?"

Insight: Successful first growth hires are specialists whose skills directly match the specific bottleneck in your current customer journey.

Tactical advice:

• Hire an Acquisition Growth Marketer if your primary friction point is top-of-funnel traffic or lead generation.
• Hire a Growth PM if you are pursuing a product-led motion and need to optimize activation or monetization within the product.
• Anchor the job description to technical execution and builder skills rather than high-level strategy.

Source: How to hire your first growth team (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-hire-your-first-growth-team)

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"In almost all cases, you want to start by hiring a Builder, to prove your model’s validity. If most of your assumptions were right and you are enjoying early traction, you should move to Optimizers next to capture most of the value, finishing with Innovators to begin iterating on the model."

Insight: Growth hiring should follow a logical progression from generalist 'Builders' who validate the model to specialists who capture value and leaders who innovate.

Tactical advice:

• Hire a 'Builder' first to validate your initial growth model hypotheses.
• Sequence functional 'Optimizers'—such as SEO or CRO specialists—only after finding early traction.
• Deploy 'Innovators' last to iterate on the established model and explore new growth loops.

Source: Six rules of hiring for growth (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/six-rules-of-hiring-for-growth)

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Insight: A growth team should prioritize high-leverage top-of-funnel wins once retention is healthy, while ensuring growth remains a cross-functional responsibility.

Tactical advice:

• Focus early growth efforts on initiatives with 2x to 10x potential rather than minor conversion rate optimizations.
• Concentrate resources on top-of-funnel channels like referrals, SEO, and performance marketing only after confirming retention is stable.
• Cultivate a culture where every department, from CX to IT, feels responsible for contributing to company growth.

Source: This Week #2: Tackling the chicken-and-egg problem, building a growth team from scratch, and addressing overlap with PM peers 🤔 (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/this-week-2-tackling-the-chicken-and-egg-problem-building-a-growth-team-from-scr)

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"It was actually only two guys: one banker and one coder. Peter (the banker) was extremely competitive. He would scream and shout when he was losing his #1 position. He had a simple success criteria: win the auction for all of the important words, and make money on it."

Insight: A tiny, high-leverage team combining commercial competitiveness with deep technical data skills can manage massive spend more effectively than a large, automated department.

Tactical advice:

• Hire competitive individuals for performance marketing who treat winning ad auctions as a personal scorecard.
• Pair marketing leads with experienced engineers to build custom dashboards rather than relying purely on generic third-party automation.
• Keep the team small even at high spend levels to maintain agility and specialized knowledge.

Source: Top 5 most interesting things about Booking.com's early growth strategy – Issue 46 (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/top-5-most-interesting-things-about-bookingcoms-early-growth-strategy---issue-46)

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Insight: Success in growth hiring requires a defined growth model and a solid data foundation before bringing in generalists or leadership.

Tactical advice:

• Build a data team before building a growth team.
• Define what growth means for your specific company before hiring generalists.
• Do not prioritize a Head of Growth as your first growth hire.

Source: Six rules of hiring for growth (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/six-rules-of-hiring-for-growth)

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Insight: Scaling a PLG motion requires specialized cross-functional talent that can bridge the gap between product development and go-to-market experimentation.

Tactical advice:

• Start with external advisors to crystallize your PLG strategy and avoid early trial-and-error mistakes.
• Appoint an internal champion who can bridge the gap between product, marketing, and sales departments.
• Hire dedicated growth roles with experience in lifecycle marketing and product experimentation once the motion is established.

Source: Five steps to starting your product-led growth motion (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/five-steps-to-starting-your-product-led-growth-motion)

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Insight: Founding teams should define the initial growth strategy themselves to avoid internal resistance and ensure the model aligns with the product's DNA.

Tactical advice:

• Own the first version of the growth model within the core leadership team.
• Use your primary growth motions to determine which department will eventually lead the growth function.
• Avoid outsourcing the mindset shift from product-building to growth-scaling to a new hire.

Source: Six rules of hiring for growth (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/six-rules-of-hiring-for-growth)

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Insight: Hiring 'Builders' who can create systems and processes is more critical in the early stages than chasing external big-name talent with copy-paste solutions.

Tactical advice:

• Prioritize 'Builder' profiles who are generalists comfortable with creating systems and processes.
• Look for candidates who have a deep understanding of the unique DNA of your product and market.
• Don't rush into external hires who may force a previous company's model onto your startup.

Source: Six rules of hiring for growth (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/six-rules-of-hiring-for-growth)

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Luc Levesque

"We talk about the 10X engineer and we don't really talk about the 10X growth advisor or 10X growth person, but the same dynamic applies. You could argue it applies even more because the right growth advisor can have literally company changing impact."

Insight: Hiring a specialized growth advisor provides immense leverage by identifying high-impact "needle in the haystack" changes that internal teams may overlook.

Tactical advice:

• Target growth advisors who have a proven track record of identifying insights that lead to thousand-percent lifts.
• Bring in growth experts at the right time to capitalize on insights that can fundamentally change a company's trajectory.
• Seek out advisors who can identify critical leverage points with targeted sentences or specific strategy shifts.

Source: Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xf_ZXIGCQb0) @ 00:18:47

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Melissa Tan

Insight:

Source: Building high-performing teams | Melissa Tan (Webflow, Dropbox, Canva) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoEfXj1b_ko) @ 00:58:44

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Meltem Kuran

Insight:

Source: An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1_sM0_ds2c) @ 00:47:30

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Peter Deng

Insight:

Source: From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products | Peter Deng (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TpakBfsmcQ) @ 00:43:35

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Shaun Clowes

Insight: B2B growth teams must evolve from proof-of-concept experiments to operationalized systems that integrate with the broader product organization.

Tactical advice:

• Establish a proof-of-concept phase for growth initiatives before scaling.
• Structure growth teams to provide leverage for the entire organization rather than operating in a silo.

Source: Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO Confluent, ex-Salesforce, Atlassian) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVS1gTAQYSU) @ 00:45:56

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Sri Batchu

"Historically the way we've been organized is we've got channel based teams that are deploying spend in a given channel. So we've got a paid marketing team, a lifecycle CRM team, we've got a field marketing team, et cetera. And then we've got a product engineering team that is supporting growth and sales and helping each of these channels be more effective that's dedicated to growth. And then separate from that, we've got a small kind of what I call an innovation or skunk work type of team that works on cross-channel."

Insight: Organize growth organizations around specific distribution channels while supporting them with dedicated growth engineering and innovation-focused experimental units.

Tactical advice:

• Structure growth into channel-specific teams for paid marketing, lifecycle CRM, and field marketing.
• Embed a dedicated growth engineering team to build custom technology that improves sales and channel efficiency.
• Maintain a small 'skunk work' team to test cross-channel experiments and emerging platforms.

Source: Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcYCU5UAZOk) @ 00:13:41

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